- Michael Gebert
- Scott Manley sniffs a black truffle
I was at Rare Tea Cellar, gourmet tea and food importer Roderick Markus’s warehouse, a Batcave of wonders along the Ravenswood line, in mid-January. Phillip Foss (El Ideas) and a couple of his cooks were there, tasting different things—scattered across Markus’s desk were upscale foodstuffs including an entire leg of jamon iberico-style ham made in Appalachia, a tray containing a few thousand dollars’ worth of both white and black truffles, assorted teas and tinctures, vinegars and liqueurs from all over the world. Also there was Scott Manley, chef of Table, Donkey and Stick in Logan Square, who also happens to be an ex-El Ideas cook, though his main background is having worked for Paul Virant at Vie and Paul Kahan at Blackbird.
I said it sounded as if he looked at charcuterie as being like pizza—you could put anything you want on it. “That’s how I feel about it,” he said. “I worked for Paul [Virant] and Nathan [Sears, now of the Radler]. They’d say, we want to make something. I’d say, okay, how do you make it, what goes into it? And they’d say, whatever you want. It needs this much salt, this much curing salt, this much dextrose, and here’s the fat ratios that are most ideal. And from there, I just started playing with these ingredients. It’s just blank canvas.”
